NOW SOME WEIRD STUFF …
Melanesia and Amazonia are divided by the full width of the Pacific Ocean, so ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were perplexed when they found that certain distinctive customs and patterns of behavior occurred in almost exactly the same forms in both places.
For example, the practice of organizing society around so-called men’s houses, where:
the men conducted secret rituals of initiation and procreation, excluded the women, and punished those who would violate the cult with gang rape or death. In both regions, the men told similar myths that explained the origin of the cults and gender separation. The resemblances were such as to convince anthropologists of the day, including Robert Lowie, Heinrich Shurtz, and Hutton Webster, that they could only have come about through diffusion. Lowie flatly declared that men’s cults are “an ethnographic feature originating in a single center, and thence transmitted to other regions.”
The parallels included not only men’s cults but also similar systems of ecological adjustment; egalitarian social organization; flexibility in local- and descent-group composition and recruitment; endemic warfare; similar religious, mythological and cosmological systems; and similar beliefs relating to the body, procreation and the self. 27
The scholarly puzzlement at these sorts of similarities has continued into the twenty-first century, for example, in a detailed study, “Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia,” published by the University of California Press in 2001,28 which followed an international symposium organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The symposium was “inspired by the suggestion often made by anthropologists that the cultures of Amazonia and Melanesia seem to display startling resemblances even though they are historically, linguistically, and geographically unrelated.”29
I do not wish to overload the reader with detail from this important in-depth study, but a few examples will give the general flavor of the results.
The Mundurukú of the Brazilian Amazon and the Avatik of the Sepik River in northern Papua New Guinea both, traditionally, visited “random, indiscriminate violence” on outsiders “as an internal requirement of the village’s male cult.” In both cases raids were seen as a special kind of hunting. In both cases cult members sought prestige in the eyes of fellow villagers by taking trophy heads during their raids. In both cases the heads were not brought back to the village until the men had undergone a ritual period of seclusion and sexual abstinence. And in both cases the heads were believed to enhance and renew fertility.30
Among the Sambia of eastern Papua New Guinea, as among the Arawete, Jivaro, and Mehinaku of the Amazon, a war leader would traditionally exhibit his erect penis as a sign of his aggression.31
Among the Alambak, the Sawos, and the Sepik Wape of Papua New Guinea, as among the Cashinahua of the Amazon, domestic conflict prior to a hunt or raid was believed to bring “bad luck” to the endeavor.32
In both Melanesia and Amazonia blood is seen as the main agent of growth and vitality. In both regions it is blood—especially menstrual blood—that is seen as the mother’s contribution to conception or gestation. In both regions semen is considered closely related to blood or interactive with blood, and many believe, more specifically, that a fetus “is formed from the combination of female blood and male semen.”33
In both Melanesia and Amazonia “the central symbols of the men’s cults” are bullroarers, flutes, and trumpets, and in both regions the myths recall a time when “women discovered, invented, or possessed” these powerful cult objects. In both regions the myths say that the former control of these objects by women allowed them to dominate men. In both regions the myths also say that the men joined forces and compelled or deceived the women into handing the cult objects over to them, resulting in a reordering of society and the dominance of men. Moreover, in both regions “the men share a strategic secret: the sounds of the trumpets, flutes and other instruments associated with the cult are not the voices of spirits but are produced by the men themselves.”34
Anthropologist Pascale Bonnemère draws attention to certain “striking similarities” in initiation rituals as performed among the Angans of New Guinea and by tribes in the Vaupés region of the Colombian Amazon. These “involve the playing of musical instruments that are hidden from women and that were owned by them in mythic times; they imply the consumption of substances that are symbolically associated with reproduction; they are interpreted in a similar way, as a rebirth of the young boys into the world of men; and myths offer keys for understanding the ritual.”35
In both Amazonia and Melanesia there are dire consequences for women, including subjection to gang rape and murder, if they see the cult instruments.36 There is also disruption to society as a whole. Among the Gimi of Papua New Guinea, for example, as among the Barasana of the Amazon, there is a belief that chaos and social disintegration will follow if the men’s sacred bamboo flutes are seen by women.37 Nonetheless, in both Amazonia and Melanesia, the men do not hesitate to “parade and play” the instruments “in public areas such as gardens and plazas that are normally open to women. As such, the men must be extraordinarily vigilant in sequestering the women during rituals”—which in practice, in both regions, means forcing them to remain indoors.38
In summary, as Thomas A. Gregor and Donald Tuzin, editors of Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia, conclude, “The similarities of men’s institutions in Amazonia and Melanesia is one of the great riddles of culture that has not received the attention that it deserves.”39 In their view it is quite noteworthy enough that the “men’s house complex”40 obtains in both regions, but “what is even more striking is that the details of the cult also bear close comparison.”41
They’re right about the magnitude of the riddle but, in my view, the solution they offer is singularly disappointing. Just like the quacks who each year conjure a new mental illness from thin air to add to the already morbidly obese Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so, too, Gregor and Tuzin are convinced that the whole weird complex of behavior around men’s cults in Melanesia and Amazonia is best understood using the tools of psychoanalysis:
We need the insights of psychology and especially that of personality dynamics to explain the emotional content and the remarkable regularities in men’s conduct in such different cultures.42
Though writing in 2001, they particularly recommend the approach taken in a 1959 paper by Robert Murphy on the Mundurukú men’s cult:
Murphy pointed out that the psychological roots of the cult draw on the universal emotional conflicts associated with the Oedipus complex. The simultaneous fear of women and antagonism toward them and the associated myths of matriarchy are reflections of the dark side of the family romance. Since the Oedipus complex is universal, Murphy wondered, “why are we not all swinging bullroarers?” His answer is that men’s cults appear to flourish in social environments where the unity of groups of men and groups of women is not blurred by competing modes of role allocation such as derive from political hierarchy or kinship. The small horticultural societies of Amazonia and Melanesia fit this description.43
Do you see what’s being sold to us here? Wrapped up in the same package of ideas that portrays the cults as the outcome of deep-rooted psychological complexes, we’re also being asked to accept that these complexes manifest in the same distinctive ways in Melanesia and Amazonia because of the state of economic development of these societies.
Both propositions are profoundly reductionist. The first seeks to reduce the remarkably similar details of male behavior in both regions to underlying psychiatric issues. The second seeks to reduce the cultural expression of such issues to the specific socioeconomic circumstances of small horticultural societies—as though flutes, trumpets, bullroarers, initiation ceremonies, ritual prohibitions, and gang rape and murder for those who break them can be expected to appear, almost automatically, in such societies.
There are other options, and the most obvious that immediately springs to mind is diff
usion. Throughout human history, ideas, religions, cults, and rituals have always traveled far. Why, therefore, should they not have done so in prehistory as well? As we’ve seen, Gregor and Tuzin do admit that at one time leading anthropologists were convinced that diffusion of ideas “from a single center” was the best explanation for the strange cultural similarities between Melanesia and Amazonia. Other than adding that subsequently “the diffusionist school of anthropology waned,”44 however, Gregor and Tuzin barely give the notion a second thought. Their whole focus remains throughout on psychological and sociological explanations.
Who knows? They could be right. They have certainly done a wonderful job of assembling the comparative cultural data, and if I were assessing that data in isolation, if it were just the bizarre and idiosyncratic similarities that keep on cropping up, if that were all there were to it, then I might be impressed by their proposed sociological psychodrama.
But that’s by no means all there is to it.
First and foremost, there’s that totally unexpected Australo-Melanesian genetic signal among Amazonian peoples, discovered in 2015, which Gregor and Tuzin could not have been aware of in 2001. The very fact that it’s there at all means that diffusion of some kind can no longer be ruled out.
Second, there’s more than a hint of a connection from cranial morphology.
Third, Australo-Melanesia and Amazonia constitute the world’s largest surviving reservoirs of linguistic diversity, suggesting that their languages have extremely ancient roots.
And now, fourth, we find complex and multilayered similarities in cultural institutions and beliefs in both these widely separated regions.
It stretches credulity to put the simultaneous occurrence of all these factors down to coincidence.
A more “parsimonious explanation,” I believe, is that something else must have been going on, some other process must have been under way behind the scenes, some other hand must have been at work, that hasn’t yet been accounted for.
APPENDIX 2
ANCIENT MAPS OF THE ICE AGE
The Waldseemüller World Map of 1507 (next page) is notable for the apparent extreme inaccuracy with which sixteenth-century Southeast Asia and Australia are represented.
By contrast the map offers a much closer match to the region as it appeared in the depths of the Ice Age around 21,300 years ago, when Sahul and Sunda (modern Southeast Asia and Australia) formed an almost continuous landmass.
Waldseemüller’s and other similar maps of the sixteenth century were produced by copying from older source maps while attempting to incorporate into them information from the voyages of discovery of Columbus and other later mariners.
Deriving from the discarded and lost older source maps, the portrayal of geographical features last present during the Ice Age hints at the existence of a lost civilization that was capable of exploring and mapping the earth in remotest prehistory.
ANTEDILUVIAN CARTOGRAPHY?
It is the—at first surprising—hypothesis of Professor Robert Fuson of the University of South Florida that the island named “Satanaze” on the 1424 Pizzagano Chart, though incorrectly located in the Atlantic Ocean, is, arguably, the earliest-surviving representation of Japan in European cartography. Professor Fuson’s 1995 book Legendary Islands of the Ocean Sea,1 in which he makes this case with a mass of corroborative evidence, came to my attention while I was researching my own book Underworld, published in 2002.
The 1424 Pizzagano Chart incorrectly locates the islands of Japan and Taiwan (respectively nominated as Satanaze and Antilia) in the Atlantic Ocean. Santanaze is the northernmost of the two dark landmasses shown at mid-left on the Chart.
I’m convinced by Professor Fuson’s argument, but what I suggest is equally significant about it is a matter that Fuson himself does not comment on, leaving open the opportunity for me to explore it at some length in Underworld—namely that “Satanaze”/Japan is not depicted as the principal Japanese islands would have looked in 1424, when details from older source maps were copied onto the Pizzagano Chart, but rather as Japan would have appeared during the lowered sea levels of the last Ice Age, in a very specific interlude, between 13,500 and 12,400 years ago, spanning the cataclysmic onset of the Younger Dryas.2
During that interlude the three principal Japanese islands, Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku, (above right) were all conjoined to form a single large island, as depicted in the sea-level-rise map (above left), based on modern geological studies.3 The depiction of “Satanaze” on the Pizzagano Chart (above center), also shows Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku as one island and accurately depicts the inlets that existed between 13,500 and 12,400 years ago southwest and northeast of what would later become the island of Shikoku.
A similar state of affairs presents itself on the other side of the world in a representation of Ireland and its surrounding waters in the Ptolemaeus Argentinae map of 1513 (below left). Below right is a bathymetric map of Ireland and the surrounding seas with a resolution of 2 minutes. Depth can be gauged through the shading as well as by the contour line, which is placed at 55 meters beneath today’s sea level. The bathymetry reveals that around 13,000 years ago, during the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age, a significant island, with an area of perhaps 100 square kilometers, occupied the exact location where the supposedly “legendary” island named “Brazil” appears on the Ptolemaeus Argentinae map of 1513.4
The implication, again, is that some unknown civilization explored the earth during the Ice Age and that copies of copies of scraps of the maps made by its seafarers and navigators survived to be used as sources of reference by cartographers in the late Middle Ages.
A clear line of transmission through the library of Alexandria via Constantinople and thence into Europe during the era of the Crusades is traced in Fingerprints of the Gods for those who wish to follow the matter further.5
THE HOLE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
Antarctica remained undiscovered by the seafarers and navigators of our civilization until the year 1819, and accordingly does not feature on early-nineteenth-century maps, such as the Pinkerton map of 1818 (below left). To the right of it, for comparison, is a modern map of Antarctica.
Curiously, although supposedly undiscovered at that time, Antarctica does appear on several maps from the sixteenth century, such as the Oronteus Finnaeus world map (top), and below it the Mercator world map, which in turn were copied from older source maps now lost.6
ISLAND OF MEGALITHS
The Piri Reis map of 1513 features the western shores of Africa and the eastern shores of North and South America and is also controversially claimed to depict Ice Age Antarctica—as an extension of the southern tip of South America. I report this claim in Fingerprints of the Gods.7
The same map (above left and top right) depicts a large island lying east of the southeast coast of what is now the United States. Also clearly depicted running along the spine of this island is a “road” of huge megaliths. In this exact spot during the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age a large island was indeed located until approximately 12,400 years ago. A remnant survives today in the form of the islands of Andros and Bimini. Underwater off Bimini (above, lower right and below) I have scuba-dived on a road of great megaliths exactly like those depicted above water on the Piri Reis map.
Again, the implication, regardless of the separate controversy of whether the so-called Bimini Road is a man-made or natural feature, is that the region must have been explored and mapped before the great floods at the end of the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise and submerged the megaliths.
APPENDIX 3
FIRST THERE WAS A FOREST, THEN THERE WAS NO FOREST, THEN THERE WAS …
What sort of place was the Amazon during the Ice Age? What was its climate? And what about the environment, vegetation, and trees?
Given the enormous importance of the world’s largest surviving rainforest in global ecology today, I had assumed the subject would have been well studied and that the experts would long ago ha
ve reached a consensus. In the case of the former I was correct but in the case of the latter I was not—for there is an ever-shifting consensus that, when you get right down to it, is pretty much the same thing as no consensus at all.
Here’s a brief timeline of the debate as I see it:
Prior to and into the 1990s, the scientific consensus supported the view that the Amazon had been largely arid during the Ice Age, with isolated rainforest “refugia” broken up by extensive areas of savanna and open vegetation.
From the mid-1990s onward, into the early years of the twenty-first century, this entire view came under attack and, out of the dispute, a new consensus emerged in which the Amazon had “always” (anyway for millions of years) been a rainforest, much as it is now.
Finally, in the past decade or so the consensus appears to have shifted again and we are told that actually, yes, much of the Amazon was savanna during the Ice Age, and that the tropical rainforest we see today has been present for at most 7,000 or 8,000 years—and barely 2,000 years in some areas.
It’s instructive to spend a few moments sampling the flavor and character of this shifting consensus. Let’s start with a paper by P. A. Colinvaux, P. E. De Oliveira, and M. B. Bush, published in January 2000 in Quaternary Science Reviews, that confirms the overthrow of the earlier, pre-1990s paradigm of an arid savanna interspersed with rainforest refugia:
Our conclusion that the Amazon lowlands were forested in glacial times specifically refutes the hypothesis of Amazonian glacial aridity.1
A few months later, Katherine Willis and Robert Whittaker of Oxford University published similar conclusions in Science:
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